Position: 40 northwest of KELP (El Paso)Altitude: 33,000 feet
Destination: KTPA (Tampa)
Fuel burn: 5,300 lbs/p/hr
PAX (passengers): 150 + 3 jumpseaters
Albuquerque Center: Recommend twenty left... There is a hole north of El Paso everyone is going through...
Captain Dave: Roger that, we'll take twenty left...
Albuquerque Center: OK, cleared to deviate twenty left; when able direct Fort Stockton and advise...
Captain Dave: OK, cleared twenty left and we'll advise...
My young co-pilot turns the heading selector 20 degrees left and the auto-pilot follows his input. The Electric Jet lowers her left wing and we are navigating toward the radar hole north of KELP. This is one of the biggest storm lines I have seen this summer. Before we left the nest, I up-loaded 2,000 pounds of uh-oh fuel. We are now using that fuel...
The storm on the left side of the hole has a big overhang. We do not want to fly underneath that overhang, if at all possible. Actually, we do not want to fly downwind of any large thunderstorm, but line ops require that very thing. Of course, if you get clobbered by hail, you will get to explain why you were flying downwind of a big storm... Catch-22 scenario.
I call the flight attendants and tell them to put the carts away and to strap in. A few seconds later, we can hear and feel the carts being shoved into the galley portals. How many times a summer do I do this? Plenty, and I never get comfortable with it. With the twist of a little knob, the co-pilot commands a reduction to turbulence penetration speed before we go through the hole. Fi-Fi slows...
As we clear the line on the east side, I breath a sigh of relief... One more time. Ahead, is another big line extending from Atlanta south into the Gulf. By the time we reach that line and find a hole, even with my extra ton of captain's fuel, we will probably be in a low fuel state on the east side. The Tampa forecast is storm free, but I am not so sure. My gut tells me we will have two turns in holding with 20 mile legs before we will have to look for a re-fueling airport.
The mania currently affecting the industry about carrying extra fuel is slowly turning my few remaining brown hairs gray.
Life on the Line continues...
20 comments:
Hey Captain!
Don't leave us hanging like that! What happens next?!?!
Love the blog - found it about 2 weeks ago and couldn't stop reading it until I was all caught up. Of course, now that means I'm absolutely overcome with anticipation for your next entry! :)
Be well and keep flying safely!
And the silly thing is that by micro-managing the tankering of fuel, therefore flying less weight, therefore getting better economy, thereby reducing costs... all it takes is one flight to divert, and all the tight optimization from the last 10? 20? 30? flights is lost.
As one who is terrified by turbulence, I am grateful to captains like you who manage to fly around the storms.
Hey Dave.. Charlie hotel here in MCO.. as a dispatcher, I have been running head long with management over extra fuel, even with careful ATC conferences and planning, I am still a pilot and dispatcher and provide more fuel than what the flight plan calls for, I use my weather judgement and add more.. I rarely get calls from any of my crews.. of course I catch it from the other end.. something I think the crews dont realize..
I got into a arguement over the regs the other day with a member of the fuel management team.. I dont want my guys/glas having to divert for fuel because I cut them to the quik based on software.. As times run on over the fuel costs, passengers need to realize that the price of a ticket has to go up, way up so these situations can be avoided.. I fear that some young dispatcher somewhere is going to get bullied into a bare min plan and the weather is going to take a big change.. and we will have an avoidable accident.. I for one will not put my crews, my license or my passenegers at risk to save $200 in fuel burn.. who knows where this will end, but I wont bend my safety margins for this, I'll quit first..
I hope your dispatchers care like I do Dave... as always I enjoy your blog.. I hope many passengers read this to help understand life at the airlines..
Hi, I am a dispatcher, and I see that you are one of the "adders", or guys who add fuel on top of what the dispatcher has determined. Now I don't know what kind of deviation fuel your DX had planned for you in this case, but if you were my flight, not only would you have Burn+FAR, but also :15 mins of company fuel, plus I would add :20 minutes of deviation fuel in that case. So you are sitting on :35 mins of fuel above the burn+FAR. Additionally, a good DX would not have you wondering how the TPA WX was coming along. That is our job, and I am surprised that you felt "in the dark" about your destination WX.
So, after all that deviation, what did you finally land with? Unfortunately I know captains at my airline that like to land A320's with 7.5 or greater even on a VFR day. At $4+ per gallon that's excessive.
And to Anonymous: a diversion is not a failure, it has been documented that a diversion is worth it if all flights were adhering to policy fuel.
Funny - Pilot's on the aircraft, he wants a bit of extra fuel.
Dispatcher's on the ground, grumpy at pilot because he's not following some bean counter's fuel management plan.
If I'm a pax on the plane, who's definition of "excessive" do I like better?
Hint: It's not the guy's sitting in a swivel chair.
Companies, and spreadsheet jockeys, will push savings until they break something. This coming from a guy who's usually working a spreadsheet on my laptop in the back rows of the flight.
Pilots are right to push back.
If there was a BIG LETTERED countdown clock in the cabin, showing the passengers how many minutes of fuel remain in the tanks at any point in the flight - and therefore how few minutes we land with often - it might provide a new parameter for shopping for their next trip.
Airline A: "One hour of fuel in the tanks upon landing, or your money back!"
Airline B: "We skimp and it shows. We are proud to be the country's best airline at landing with bare legal minimums in the fuel tanks - (well except for the odd case when we go too far, but, then the paper work is still worth the savings to You!) $10 off your ticket every time! Fly Cheapo!"
hey dave, id have thought that the overhag pictured wouldnt have been dangerous/worrying, it looked pretty calm so no lightning or rogue winds. is there something im missing?
Scarecrow, That overhang on the thunderstorm is where some of the worst hail and windshear can come from. A storm can easily throw hail 20 miles from its edge and that overhang is essential showing what direction that hail is going to be thrown from the storm.
Man, I love this blog. The information is so interesting, and the comments are great. I'm not a pilot, but sure am fascinated by the industry.
flyerist- yeah, I guess I am an "adder". The company has cut our fuel loads to minimum required by the FAA plus 10-20 minutes hold plus historical taxi. This leaves me in a tight spot if I cannot land on schedule. We now have to declare an emergency if we get into the FAA required reserve, where as before it was considered "reserve" to use as necessary. As to the TPA TAF... Before I left I had a conversation with my dispatcher about the TPA wx. It was 4cast good with no chance of TRW, but I felt that was questionable from my experience of TPA summer afternoons. It is a good thing I fueled up or we would have been going to MCO with 10 other arrivals. I will blog on this next. Thanks for your input. I always like to hear from dispatchers.
Hi Dave.
Fab blog. I love reading it. Also good to see you still think in the SA format. I do as well and sometimes when I give out METARs I have to put in effort to avoid thinking of the sequence as an SA.
ps. For those that don't know what I'm talking about TRW is now TS SHRA.
F*ckin' eh! I can't believe the absurdity! I obviously don't speak for the masses, but paying a little more money to fly safely on planes that are properly fueled is still worth every dollar. Thanks for writing about this, and opening up such a great and informative discussion!
Thanks also for inspiring me to start my own blog Dave, I'm having a great time writing about my own adventures these days.
It is hopefully clear that the minimum fuel loads which are being discussed are not unsafe, It isn't as-if a plane arrives 5 minutes late and is doomed to glide in.
Rather, the debate is about the size of the extra fuel carried on board. The sophistication of the fuel calculations is amazing - aircraft do cross-ocean journeys and land within 100 pounds of the expected fuel burn.
The fuel load includes the expected fuel burn for flight, a suitable amount for startup and taxi, and an allotment to fly to an alternate airport should it not be possible to land at the planned destination. And then additional amounts get added for expected traffic (trying to land or depart from EWR, JFK or LGA?). And then for weather (including headwinds)according to the forecast.
Then some extra fuel, perhaps, because the captain has experience, and knows the probability of glitches.
The problem is that there are a series of reasonable and calculated assumptions regarding the future. If any assumption goes bad, and another doesn't make up for it, then the aircraft is tight on fuel.
Any of a number of options is chosen, such as stopping enroute and loading more fuel (Dave blogged about a flight to Alaska where this happened), going straight to the alternate, doing a few orbits at the destination and then going to alternate, or declaring a fuel emergency and jumping to the front of the landing queue.
You can even land with less than the proper reserve in the tanks (anyone ever drive with the little yellow "Low Fuel" light on?), but there will be paperwork, and there better be a good reason.
None of these are unsafe - they rank about equal to the severity of stopping for gas 50 miles before your driving destination.
But all of the options are inconvenient, and some involve paperwork. And you can get compounding issues, such as a pilot hitting their duty day maximum, or landing at an airport and encountering no-takeoff-allowed time limitations, and so forth.
But it isn't inherently unsafe.
...looks like common sense from the preceding commentator.
Still there shouldn't be any strait-jacket for an experienced captain like Captain Dave!
Another interesting post. Some comments had me checking my dictionary of aviation terms - a great way to learn.
Looking forward to your next post, Dave, as always...
Capt Dave, good stuff as usual. You have taught me so much. CFI bound...
Off Topic: Is it just me or does American Airlines seem to have an unusually high number of in-flight engine failures, esp. on their MD-80 series planes? The latest one out of LaGuardia was an apparent uncontained failure that left pieces of the engine on the tarmac. I remember reading a few years ago about an uncontained failure that sliced through the cabin and killed a passenger.
Welcome to the sub-tropics! :) You know what they say: If you don't like the weather in Florida, wait fifteen minutes.
It's kind of reassuring to see that even the "big boys" have to sweat thunderstorms and other hazards just like us scud-running flight students.
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